About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

The question of belief, part I

by Massimo Pigliucci

So, following the advice of my fellow RS writer, Ian Pollock (in his latest “Picks”) I went back and downloaded two of the classical essays about faith and skepticism: William James’ “The Will to Believe” (1896) and William Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” (1877). The former was actually in part a response to the latter. In this post I will tackle James, next time we’ll look at Clifford [link here].

I must say upfront that — quite aside from my intellectual commitment to skepticism and instinctive abhorrence of anything smelling like faith — I found James’ essays surprisingly and insufferably vacuous and pretentious. Aesthetic judgment notwithstanding, let’s look at his so-called argument (I am using the word very charitably).

James starts out by lamenting that “I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically.” So, it’s interesting to see that his own students rejected his arguments as soon as they had “imbued” the logical spirit, i.e., as soon as they deployed reason in the service of their philosophical analysis. The perils of teaching critical thinking, I suppose.

James continues his essay by providing his readers with a series of preliminary building blocks for his argument, the centerpiece of which will come at the end of the piece. So, for instance, in section II he finds it “preposterous” to think that our opinions may be modified at will, and provides these examples: “Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?” Well, no, we cannot. But that is quite plainly because we have overwhelming evidence of our rheumatism or of the amount of money in our pocket. Still, fair enough, the point is that one cannot simply will one’s beliefs in arbitrary directions (atheists say the same to incredulous believers, of course: I can’t just “accept” Jesus — my brain revolts at the idea).

James’ second building block comes in section III, where he claims — anticipating modern research in cognitive psychology, to be sure — that belief is not a simple matter of reasoning out the possibilities, but rather the result of “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, [but] we hardly know how or why.” Again, true enough. And in fact he goes on to suggest that often what we call reason is little more than cherry picking and rationalizing: “Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticised by some one else.” [Of course, he had absolutely no empirical evidence on which to base his contention that this happens anywhere near 999/1000 cases, but that’s nitpicking...] Now, it is precisely because of this that philosophical reflection is important: the whole idea is to train one’s mind to spot rationalizations and avoid logical fallacies and cognitive biases. For that, it helps if you present your reasoning to others to see how they react — James’ own students refusal to go along with his program should have been telling him something.

The first big problem arises within that very section III, when James wishes to use his points so far to conclude that there is no difference between a skeptic and a believer: “If a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another — we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.” I don’t think so, dear Will. Just because belief is a complex matter and people at times rationalize rather than reason, it does not follow that anyone’s wishful thinking is philosophically equivalent to a position of skepticism about the same. But more on this below.

Section IV is very short, and it essentially boils down to this statement: “The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision — just like deciding yes or no — and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.” No, it isn’t. James is attempting to eliminate the option of moderate skepticism, forcing his readers into a dichotomous choice: you either say yes (to faith) or you don’t. If you pretend to suspend judgment because of lack of evidence, you are really just saying no. But belief can (and often is) a matter of degree, where yes and no are simply the extremes at the end of a continuum (for a Bayesian, they would be equivalent to assuming priors of 1 and 0, respectively). Moreover, not all beliefs are equally justified by the evidence (in Bayesian terms, the distribution of priors is not flat), so that it may make perfect sense to adopt an intermediate position if the agent judges that there is nothing (yet) that clearly tips one’s conclusions in one direction or another.

Section V starts with a net separation of the believer from the skeptic: “The postulate that there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.” But how on earth can James know there there is a truth, and that moreover our minds can attain it? And what “truth” are we talking about anyway? There are many possible truths concerning all sorts of subject matters, some of which may and others may not be attainable by human minds, so as a general principle this is sheer nonsense. But of course James is talking about religious truth, so we will proceed further and even more clearly let him hang himself with his twisted logic.

In section VI the author temporarily returns to reasonable philosophical grounds: “I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. ... Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one else.” Okay, this is consistent with James’ pragmatism, though it smells a bit too much of epistemic relativism (as much later Richard Rorty infamously extrapolated from pragmatist beginnings).

Section VII starts well, but then takes a pretty bad turn. Here is the reasonable bit: “We must know the truth; and we must avoid error — these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.” He is correct here: although if we believe A to be true and it is indeed true, we may thus avoid the error of believing in B, which is not true, this doesn’t guarantee that we don’t end up also believing in all sorts of other erroneous notions: C, D, E, etc. From this, however, what James says next doesn’t follow at all: “We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. ... he who says, ‘Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ [a reference to Clifford] merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.” Oh no, you didn’t! It is easy to see that truths and falsehoods are not in a symmetrical relation to each other at all (which is implied by James’ own earlier statement in this section). There are many more potentially false notions out there than true ones, for the simple reason that there is one universe (aside for the possibility of a multiverse, of course) while there are infinite ways in which the universe could be. That is why the skeptic’s position is more reasonable: because error lurks everywhere and truth is rare. Statistically speaking, this is a no brainer.

Indeed, in section VIII James seems to admit as much: “Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all.” So, the principle of cautious skepticism applies for all scientific questions (whew!) and in human affairs in general. Okay, then, where exactly does it not apply, and why?

We find that out in section IX: “Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal [he of the infamous wager] calls our heart.” I was with James right until the end, and then he blew it. That’s right, science can provides us with facts, not values (pace Sam Harris), but that is why we’ve got philosophy. Philosophy, not religious, my dear Will!

In the same section James attempts to validate his faith in faith, but the examples are lacking: “Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.” Granted, those achievements are facilitated by one’s optimism in one’s abilities, but the outcome is in fact always a matter of the usual suspects: effort, skill, and luck. Faith, in James’ sense, simply doesn’t enter into it.

Finally, we get to section X, which is supposed to deliver the punchline. Prepare yourself to be sorely disappointed. James admits that “religion” is a pretty vague category, as there are countless religions and even more (contradictory) religious beliefs. So he needs to abstract things to a high degree if his defense of faith isn’t going to be too tied to any specific doctrine, on which he is not apparently willing to bet his (eternal) life. I am quoting the next bit in full because I do not wish to give the impression that I am shortchanging him:

“Religion says essentially two things. First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. ‘Perfection is eternal’ — this phrase of Charles Secretan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all. The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.”

Holy crap! Of course science cannot verify the first tenet of religion: it is meaningless! What exactly could one mean by the utterance that the best things are the more eternal and overlapping things, the things that say the final word? What word? Overlapping with what? How does anyone know anything about these “things”? What are these things?

And the following bit is absolutely precious: “We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else?” Setting aside for a moment the potentially sexist tone of the remark, yes, the man would cut himself off from that “angel-possibility,” but the situation is not at all analogous to that of religion (not to mention that the man might conceivably be happier without any angels around — again, beware of false dichotomies!). The man knows pretty much what he is likely to gain or loose by his decision, and even by his indecision, but we still have not been told by James what exactly it is that we would lose by not believing. The chance of being thrown one last stone by the universe, perhaps? Thanks, I’ll pass.

"Wild Bill" James, it must be admitted, is sometimes an embarrassment to admirers of the so-called "classical pragmatists" like myself. Dewey spent a good deal of time and effort explaining his less restrained pronouncements. This particular work presents an especially daunting task to an apologist, and I don't know Dewey ever tried to defend it. Like Peirce, I'm no fan of faux doubt as we find sometimes in philosophy, and feel proof of the kind used in establishing whether some things are the case is not necessarily required as support for a reasonable belief in others, but I think James failed here rather badly.

James was reputedly a great teacher and ground-breaking psychologist, however, and while he was evidently not the most rigorous philosopher inspired and influenced (if he didn't persuade) many, such as his friend, Royce, and his student, Santayana.

Your article broaches so many interesting topics! But alas! I will constrain myself to this:

Re: "Now, it is precisely because of this that philosophical reflection is important: the whole idea is to train one’s mind to spot rationalizations and avoid logical fallacies and cognitive biases. For that, it helps if you present your reasoning to others to see how they react ... ."

This is by far the most important part of your article. C.S. Peirce once quipped, "The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty.” For Peirce, adopting beliefs with the intention of discovering verifying evidence ex post facto is anathema for just the reasons you mention: Humans, for Peirce, are far too given to biases and systematic errors (e.g. we are horrible at reasoning along probabilistic lines) and thus too inclined to remain dogmatic about emotionally important beliefs. (If you have not already, you read Peirce's papers "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) & "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) for his prescient response to James.)

One of Clifford's points in "The Ethics of Belief" was essentially this as well. For Clifford, whilst accepting certain beliefs without or contrary to evidence may at first appearances be harmless, doing so sets a danger example and sets one up for habitually adopting beliefs contrary to the evidence (cf. the correlation between those who believe in various conspiracy theories, the connection between autism and vaccines, and religious beliefs).

P.S. As an aside, largely due to James' (and later Dewey's) misuse of the term "pragmatism" Peirce coined "pragmaticism" to describe his philosophical stance. Peirce very much wished to distance himself from James' bastardization.

*In the pragmatic way of thinking in terms of conceivable practical implications, every thing has a purpose, and its purpose is the first thing that we should try to note about it.*Charles Sanders Peirce

One can never (nor should one attempt to) "pass at a distance from" Peirce. That said, one need not accept EVERYTHING he wrote in order to find merit in much / most of what he wrote. Peirce was guilty of dabbling in speculative (and wholly unnecessary) metaphysics -- he, after all, a theist -- but that should not deter us from admiring what is admirable in his (ridiculously large and influential) corpus.

Eamon, I think you missed my point that Massimo has made it clear he does not believe that every thing has a purpose. Or even if something did, that it should be the first thing you should note, as it likely should have no notable philosophical relevance to anything in any case.

And of course I don't agree with everything that Peirce has written, but there is such a thing as an occasional good idea, and Peirce had some of the very goodest.

As far as I know he was a theist. If I recall accurately, Peirce did not write much about his religious beliefs, and what little he did he did not write about personal characteristics of god, but he also intimated that there such things as immortality and communion with this deity after death.

Though this is a bit tangential to the present post, if you have not already, read Susan Haack's classic take down of what she calls Vulgar Rortyism. The article stems from a review of Louis Menand's (oh so very horrible) edited Pragmatism: A Reader she authored in 1997. Read it here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rortyism-haack-3261

My reaction to James was similar, though my own exclamations are not to be repeated in decent company. What stuns me still is the enormous influence of James on `liberal' believers.

I'm surprised you did not pursue the criticisms of James' pragmatic theory of truth as given by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy:

Now strange to say, James, throughout [Will to Believe], never mentions probability, and yet there is almost always some discoverable consideration of probability in regard to any question. Let it be conceded (though no orthodox believer would concede it) that there is no evidence either for or against any of the religions of the world. Suppose you are a Chinese, brought into contact with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity. You are precluded by the laws of logic from supposing that each of the three is true. Let us suppose that Buddhism and Christianity each has an even chance, then, given that both cannot be true, one of them must be, and therefore Confucianism must be false. If all three are to have equal chances, each must be more likely to be false than true. In this sort of way James's principle collapses as soon as we are allowed to bring in considerations of probability. [I think you captured the essence of this criticism, but I rather like this example. - Arthur.]

[...]

In a chapter on pragmatism and religion [James] reaps the harvest. "We cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it." "If the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true." "We may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own."

I find great intellectual difficulties in this doctrine. It assumes that a belief is "true" when its effects are good. If this definition is to be useful-and if not it is condemned by the pragmatist's test-we must know (a) what is good, (b) what are the effects of this or that belief, and we must know these things before we can know that anything is "true," since it is only after we have decided that the effects of a belief are good that we have a right to call it "true." The result is an incredible complication. Suppose you want to know whether Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492. You must not, as other people do, look it up in a book. You must first inquire what are the effects of this belief, and how they differ from the effects of believing that he sailed in 1491 or 1493. This is difficult enough, but it is still more difficult to weigh the effects from an ethical point of view. You may say that obviously 1492 has the best effects, since it gives you higher grades in examinations. But your competitors, who would surpass you if you said 1491 or 1493, may consider your success instead of theirs ethically regrettable. Apart from examinations, I canont think of any practical effects of the belief except in the case of a historian.

But this is not the end of the trouble. You must hold that your estimate of the consequences of a belief, both ethical and factual, is true, for if it is false your argument for the truth of your belief is mistaken. But to say that your belief as to consequences is true is, according to James, to say it has good consequences, and this in turn is only true if it has good consequences, and so on ad infinitum. Obviously this won't do.

[...]

James's doctrine is an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of scepticism, and like all such attempts it is dependent on fallacies. In his case the fallacies spring from an attempt to ignore all extra-human facts. Berkelian idealism combined with scepticism causes him to substitute belief in God for God, and to pretend that this will do just as well.

I'm looking forward to your impression of Clifford's Ethics. It struck a deep chord with me back in my teenage years. Though there are parts I would now qualify, my sympathy with the main thrust remains.

Lord (Bertie) Russell, unfortunately, had a tendency to impute James' weaknesses to other pragmatists, such as Dewey, through the relatively sure-fire method of ignoring Dewey's responses to Russell's criticisms (though perhaps he did not do so to Peirce; being a logician, Peirce was similar enough to Russell to escape criticism). I'm not sure Russell ever forgave Dewey for being so kind to him. But then Russell tended to find any thought dissimilar to his own incomprehensible. His view of Wittgenstein is another example.

well, I can't always take on libertarianism and feminist issues, you know... But the reason I started this two-part series is because these James' and Clifford’s essays are classics, and always cited on both sides of the debate on belief. But yeah, it did feel a bit like shooting a fish in the barrel.

> Eamon, I think you missed my point that Massimo has made it clear he does not believe that every thing has a purpose. <

It really shouldn't surprise me, but I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that you do not seem to be able to make a distinction between the actions of, say, a human being (where purpose may apply) and those of a bacterium (where applying purpose is a category mistake).

Eamon,

yes, I was aware of the Haack article, it's a classic. And thank you for your thoughtful comments, as usual. Missed you during the libertarian and sexual harassment debates...

I decided not to enter into the libertarian debate for two reasons. First, I came to it after about 100 comments or so, and figured anything I wrote would be buried in the next flurry of comments, and, second, some of the comments (on both sides) struck me as lending themselves to less than civil discourse and I did not want to participate in that.

@Massimo,"you do not seem to be able to make a distinction between the actions of, say, a human being (where purpose may apply) and those of a bacterium (where applying purpose is a category mistake)."Peirce would say that if you look for a purpose in a bacterium, you will find a need to perform as bacteria of that species are expected to do, and may also find that it cheats on occasion as its fellow bacteria have expected.And do you really believe that the bacteria that abound in your human gut have no purpose there, and none in any case that's similar to yours?

I have no doubt that you believe that, but you've had little to say about why Peirce and others like him are wrong to take the opposite view. If you're a serious philosopher, or in any case a teacher of philosophy, this would seem to be an important area of, at the very least, dispute. Something new that you could write a book about, if you're up to taking criticism for what could be an original point of view.

it would really be nice if you (and others) dropped the implicit or exploit insults ("if you are a serious philosopher") and just stick to the point. Speaking of which: are you saying that Pierce believed that bacteria have purposes in the same sense in which human beings do? That's news to me.

If you are an exceedingly serious philosopher [I'm joking, by the way] you might enjoy reading "Charles Peirce's Guess at the Riddle" by John Sheriff. The riddle in question, of course, is that of the Sphinx. If I understand it correctly, Sheriff speculates that Peirce felt that the universe may not have been created for a purpose, but in the course of its development and as the result of the interaction of its constituents, tends towards a purpose.

Yes, I am speaking of that same sense of purpose. We humans are composed in large part of cooperative bacteria in any case. Obviously you and some others feel that without us they'd have no purpose, and therefor with us, they still have none, as any purpose there is simply that of ours to use them.But all living beings make proactive choices, and all choices, binary, proactive, reactive, must be made for a purpose. To believe otherwise, you'd have to believe that choice making is not, or not always, an intelligent process. And perhaps you do.

And I presume you recognize that by speaking of the same sense of purpose, you're avoiding any reference to the necessary differences between purposes to start with.It's those differences that make the world go round. Either that or of course there'd be no need to have come up with the concept of purpose at all.And regardless of my version in any case, what's your version of what Peirce believed about purpose?

we have gone through this before, as I said. You are simply confusing two separate meanings of purpose, analogous to the distinction between teleonomy and teleology in philosophy.

There is the purpose of a conscious reflective agent. Clearly, humans have it. Equally clearly, bacteria and much else don't.

Then there is "purpose" in the sense of living beings acting *as if*, as a result of natural selection (those that din't act that way didn't leave descendants). According to Dennett, for practical purposes (such as your problem solving business) you can adopt an intentional stance for things that are not actually conscious agents, but you do so at the risk of conceptual confusion.

So, for instance, you can say that a thermostat has the "purpose" of keeping temperature within a set range, but it isn't really the thermostat per se that has the purpose, it is whoever designed it, so that the thermostat is an agent of someone else's purpose, in this example.

There are of course two basic ways of looking at purpose, those being having one and serving one. But your example misses the point that thermostats serve their makers purposes and bacteria serve their own purposes. Dennett, Dawkins, and others of the neoDarwinist persuasion refuse to understand that, and it has a lot to with their belief that life is not defined by its intelligence but by the intelligence of whatever they surmise in nature is selecting for it. Which is beside the point when you accept the more recent discoveries that testify to the unexpected degrees of intelligence of the smallest and supposedly simplest life forms found.I know it's useless for me to argue with you on this point, but you're not the only one that others talk to in the comments section. And further, is it useless to ask you to comment on the apparent mistake that Peirce made, rather than on those you think are being made by such as I?

I should add that I define intelligence as the ability to use the trial and error process to solve predictive problems. Obviously if that ability exists, then it must serve an evolutionary purpose, but if it doesn't exist, then of course nothing unintelligent can purposefully evolve itself.

The purpose of selection is to remove failures (it is eliminative), leaving survival by any means, as intelligent humans or flesh eating bacteria that might survive longer than humans (allowing analysis of the various bases for survival). If anyone has another theory of purpose than that, state it, because random mutations can produce vast life forms and what survives is selected without a purpose other than to die if it is a failure within its environment.

Let's say eyelashes mutate from fingernails, shifting things we try to delicately grasp, and are selected for non-survival for that reason. Mutations are supposedly random, and it doean't matter if the base is a successful set of nails or any other cells of our anatomy, if it is a random impediment it perishes. Trial and error continues based on randomness in standard theories.

I think Peirce's metaphysics was deeply (and unfortunately) influenced by various modes idealism then in vogue in British and American academia. It is this influence which helped lead him to develop some of his more regrettable ideas.

I should explain that I'm obviously not an academic observer here. I'm a retired professional investigator, having worked for over 20 years as a Federal Agent and another 20 as a Private Eye. And I've spent a lot of my time in Academia as my particular duties required. But more time than that in the real world where purposes are the things that are most hidden.

Sometimes I will playfully banter with you and others about being wrong on this or that point (like your political and moral philosophy :p), and I expect others to do likewise with me. However, from my experience debating eliminative materialism with certain others on here, and from some of the comments in the libertarian debate, or in the debate on teleology, I have noticed far too much invective. The whole "if you were smart / a competent philosopher / or not a nut job you would agree with me" business is really tiresome.